[GNC] QIF Import Fails

[Adrien Monteleone]

Art,

Glad you found your transactions!

Tracking down why it happened in the first place would certainly be of benefit to you and other users. From the info you provided from the QIF, I can’t see why GnuCash would have assigned that account. I would have thought it try to use Imbalance-CUR if it fails to find or create a valid account. If they were supposed to go to Assets:Checking, is that where the assignment error occured? I don’t use the importer, but my understanding is that you set one account (like Checking) and then the Quicken category info becomes the ‘other’ account assigned. If you didn’t notice that the first assigned account was Equity:Retained Earnings, (for whatever reason) then that would be the cause. If you had correctly set it to Assets:Checking then that is a bug worth investigating further.

If all of the transactions sent there go to Checking, then just delete the Retained Earnings account and GnuCash will ask you where you want to move them to. (to save you some time) Of course, if you have real transactions in Retained Earnings that you want to keep, you can’t use this workflow.

That account is used to hold the annual net of Income-Expenses if you close the books each year. It is a holdover from the pen and paper days. It is not generally needed with GnuCash. (but will be used if you perform a ‘close books’ function)


Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 4, 2019, at 5:59 PM, Art Chimes <arts.online at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the troubleshooting suggestions. Adrien pointed out the
> ability to filter register displays, for which I am thankful. As a new
> user, I hadn't discovered that tool yet.
> 
> He also suggested searching to see if the transaction ended up
> imported into some other account. Which is exactly what happened.
> Instead of going into the checking account where it was supposed to
> go, this transaction -- and many others I thought I had failed to
> import -- ended up in "Equity:Retained Earnings." I suspect "retained
> earnings" has some specific accounting definition, but I don't know
> what it is or what transactions actually belong in that account. I do
> know that it was not my intention to put those transactions in that
> account, and I am pretty sure I did not assign any transactions to
> that account in the import process.
> 
> In 2009, a user filed a bug report in Bugzilla on just this behavior.
> (https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603761). Another user
> replied to the bug report, "The importer is assuming these are opening
> balance transactions. Could you explain why this type of transaction
> is legitimate for some other purpose?" My transaction involved a bank
> account interest payment. (In Quicken there is no separate income
> account so the bank account has an interest payment that appears as if
> by magic; it can be credited to the account or transferred to another
> account.)
> 
> I can manually move these transactions, one-by-one, to where they
> should be. But going forward, do I just have to resign myself to a lot
> of QIF editing? Since I imagine that a lot of QIF importer users are
> migrating from Quicken, perhaps some Quicken-specific warnings or
> something could be considered?
> 
> Thanks again,
> Art
> 
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2019 11:25:00 -0500
>> From: Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net>
>> To: Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
>> Subject: Re: [GNC] QIF Import Fails
>> Message-ID: <FE5D5ACC-C7DA-46BF-86F5-1E128D7C36E6 at lusfiber.net>
>> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=utf-8
>> 
>> Any time I?m in a pickle and can?t see a transaction that should be there, I check that the register is not set to a filtered view. The transaction might be hidden for some reason. I also check one of the registers for the other accounts involved in the transaction.
>> 
>> There is also a very powerful Find feature that you can even use regex with to find it.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Adrien
>> 
>>> On Apr 3, 2019, at 9:16 PM, Art Chimes <arts.online at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> !Type:Bank
>>> D7/ 1/97
>>> U5.32
>>> T5.32
>>> CX
>>> PInterest Earned
>>> L_IntInc
>>> ^
>>> 
>>> Above is an example of a transaction that is failing to import. The
>>> QIF export is from Quicken 2000 via Windows.
>>> 
>>> I've had problems with imports before, but eventually figured out the
>>> problem. This one has me stymied. I  successfully imported
>>> transactions from 1998-present, but the older ones aren't cooperating.
>>> 
>>> The importer process seems to work ok, concluding with the encouraging
>>> notice, "QIF Import Completed" However, the transaction does not
>>> appear in the account register.
>>> 
>>> One possible clue: I get a screen that asks me to match this
>>> transaction with one of two others that have the same
>>> date/amount/payee, even though the transaction doesn't appear in the
>>> account.
>>> 
>>> This is actually one of numerous exports from the same Quicken file.
>>> Some work; others don't, and my troubleshooting hasn't gotten me
>>> anywhere. From the "about" screen: Version: 3.4; Build ID: 3.4+
>>> (2018-12-30)
>>> 
>>> Thanks to the community for your help!
>>> 
>>> Art